At 10:38 AM -0600 3/18/03, David Walker wrote:
I believe there are a number of us interested in this type of solution but for
it to work we would have to distill the ideas together.
Checking the from header has serious implications with mailing lists and I
proposed that we do not check the from header but check the envelope from and
require that MUAs expose the envelope from in the form of "from 'envelope
from' on behalf of 'from header'"
Require in what sense? The RFCs already require that it be put in
Return-Path: by the delivery agent. Is having the MUA display it
really going to change anything?
One of the things I discovered, in my fight to keep people from
putting wormalert(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com in their address book, is that many
people don't see the email address at all. I don't know if this is
because the UA doesn't show it, or because they just stop "seeing"
it. But I got so many "who the hell are you" responses when I
replied as "From: Kee Hinckley <wormalert(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>" that I had
to change it to "From: wormalert(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com Admin
<wormalert(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>" so that they'd realize this was something
they'd sent to. (And even that didn't help, since in their address
book it was usually there as "AAAA" so they would claim they didn't
send me the email. And their UA was hiding the address even when
they sent--they only saw the AAAA.
The only chance you have of exposing the Return-Path so that people
will see it is to have the MUA change the text of the from name to
include the return-path if the return-path is different from the
from. E.g.
From: "Kee Hinckley via asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
<nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>"
And they won't understand it. I get so many people who don't
understand that From: has no bearing on the person that sent the
email that I have an auto-response for the problem.
But more to the point. I don't think the IETF is in a position to be
specifying proper user interface behavior. Suggest perhaps, but I
wouldn't depend on the results.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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